Michael Connelly (108 page)

He could tell she was crying.

“Well, I’m coming up there.”

“I won’t be here,” she said urgently. “I packed the car before I paged you. I knew you’d try to come.”

Bosch put his hand over his eyes. He wanted to be in darkness.

“Where will you be?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Will you call?”

“Yes, I’ll call.”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m . . . I’ll be fine.”

“Eleanor, I love you. I know I never said that enough but I —”

She made a shushing sound in the phone and he stopped.

“I love you, Harry, but I have to do this.”

After a long moment, during which he felt a deep tearing inside, he said, “Okay, Eleanor.”

The silence that followed was as dark as the inside of a coffin. His coffin.

“Good-bye, Harry,” she finally said. “I’ll see you.”

She hung up. Bosch took his hand away from his face and the phone from his ear. In his mind he saw a swimming pool, its surface as smooth as a blanket on a bed. He remembered a time long before when he had been told his mother was dead and that he was alone in the world. He ran to that pool and dove beneath the calm surface, into its warm water. At the bottom, he screamed until his air was gone and his chest ached. Until he had to choose between staying there and dying, or going up and life.

Bosch now longed for that pool and its warm water. He wanted to scream until his lungs burst inside him.

“Everything okay?”

He looked up. It was Rider and Edgar. Edgar carried a steaming cup of coffee. Rider had a look that said she was concerned or maybe even scared by the look she was seeing on Bosch’s face.

“Everything’s cool,” Bosch said. “Everything’s fine.”

23

They had ninety minutes to kill before the meeting with Pelfry. Bosch told Edgar to drive over to Hollywood Wax & Shine, on Sunset not far from the station. Edgar pulled to the curb and they sat there watching. Business was slow. Most of the men in orange coveralls who dried and polished the cars for minimum wage and tips were sitting around, drying rags draped over their shoulders, waiting. Most of them stared balefully at the slickback as if the police were to blame.

“I guess people aren’t that interested in having their cars washed when they might end up turned over or torched,” Edgar said.

Bosch didn’t answer.

“Bet they all wish they were in Michael Harris’s shoes,” Edgar continued, staring back at the workers. “Hell,
I’d
trade three days in an interview room and pencils in my ears to be a millionaire.”

“So then you believe him,” Bosch said.

Bosch hadn’t told him about Frankie Sheehan’s barroom confession. Edgar was quiet a moment and then nodded.

“Yeah, Harry, I guess I sort of do.”

Bosch wondered how he had been so blind as to not even have considered that the torturing of a suspect could be true. He wondered what it was about Edgar that made him accepting of the suspect’s story over the cops’. Was it his experience as a cop or as a black man? Bosch assumed it had to be the latter and it depressed him because it gave Edgar an edge he could never have.

“I’m gonna go in, talk to the manager,” Bosch said. “Maybe you should stay with the car.”

“Fuck that. They won’t touch it.”

They got out and locked the car.

As they walked toward the store Bosch thought about the orange coveralls and wondered if it was coincidence. He guessed that most of the men working at the car wash were ex-cons or fresh out of county lockup—institutions in which they also had to wear orange coveralls.

Inside the store Bosch bought a cup of coffee and asked for the manager. The cashier pointed down a hallway to an open door. On the way down the hall, Edgar said, “I feel like a Coke but I don’t think I can drink a Coke after what I saw last night in that bitch’s closet.”

A man was sitting at a desk in the small, windowless office with his feet up on one of the open drawers. He looked up at Bosch and Edgar and said, “Yes, Officers, what can I do for you?”

Bosch smiled at the man’s deduction. He knew he had to be part businessman, part parole officer. If the polishers were ex-cons, it was the only job they could get. That meant the manager had seen his share of cops and knew how to pick them out. Either that or he saw them pull up in the slickback.

“We’re working a case,” Bosch began. “The Howard Elias case.”

The manager whistled.

“A few weeks ago he subpoenaed some of your records. Receipts with license plate numbers on them. You know anything about that?”

The manager thought about it for a few moments.

“All I know is that I was the one who had to go through everything and get it copied for his guy.”

“His guy?” Edgar asked.

“Yeah, what do you think, a guy like Elias comes get the stuff himself? He sent somebody. I got his card here.”

He lowered his feet to the floor and opened the desk’s pencil drawer. There was a stack of business cards with a rubber band around it. He took it off and looked through the cards and chose one. He showed it to Bosch.

“Pelfry?” Edgar asked.

Bosch nodded.

“Did his guy say exactly what they were looking for in all that stuff?” he asked.

“I don’t know. You’d have to ask them. Or, I mean, ask Pelfry.”

“Did Pelfry come back with the stuff yet?”

“No. It was copies, anyway. I mean, he came back but not to bring back the receipts.”

“Then why’d he come back?” Edgar asked.

“He wanted to see one of Michael Harris’s old time cards. From when he worked here.”

“Which one?” Edgar asked, a tone of urgency in his voice.

“I don’t remember, man. I gave him a copy. You go talk to him and maybe he —”

“Did he have a subpoena for the time card?” Bosch asked.

“No, he just asked for it, you know. I said sure and got it for him. But he gave me the date and you didn’t. I don’t remember it. Anyway, look, if you want to ask more about this then maybe you better call our lawyer. I’m not going to get involved in talking about stuff I don’t —”

“Never mind that stuff,” Bosch said. “Tell me about Michael Harris.”

“What’s to tell? I never had a problem with the guy. He was okay, then they came in and said he killed that little girl. And did things to her. It didn’t seem like the guy I knew. But he hadn’t been working here that long. Maybe five months.”

“Know where he was before that?” Edgar asked.

“Yeah. Up at Corcoran.”

Corcoran was a state prison near Bakersfield. Bosch thanked the manager and they left. He took a few sips of his coffee but dumped it in a trash can before getting back to the car.

While Bosch waited at the passenger door for it to be unlocked, Edgar went around to his side. He stopped before opening the door.

“Goddammit.”

“What?”

“They wrote shit on the door.”

Bosch came around and looked. Someone had used light blue chalk—the chalk used to write washing instructions on the windshields of clients’ cars—to cross out the words
To protect and serve
on the driver’s side front fender. Then written in large letters were the words
To murder and maim.
Bosch nodded his approval.

“That’s pretty original.”

“Harry, let’s go kick some ass.”

“No, Jerry, let it go. You don’t want to start something. It might take three days to end it. Like last time. Like Florence and Normandie.”

Edgar sullenly unlocked the car and then opened Bosch’s door.

“We’re right by the station,” Bosch said after he got in. “We can go back and spray it off. Or we can use my car.”

“I’d like to use one of those assholes’ faces to clean it off.”

After they had the car cleaned up there was still time for them to drive by the lot where Stacey Kincaid’s body had been found. It was off Western and was on the way downtown, where they would go to meet Pelfry.

Edgar was silent the whole way there. He had taken the vandalism of the patrol car personally. Bosch didn’t mind the silence, though. He used the time to think about Eleanor. He felt guilty because deep down and despite his love for her, he knew that he was feeling a growing relief that their relationship was coming to a head, one way or the other.

“This is it,” Edgar said.

He pulled the car to the curb and they scanned the lot. It was about an acre and bordered on both sides by apartment buildings with banners announcing move-in bonuses and financing. They didn’t look like places where people would want to live unless they had no choice. The whole neighborhood had a run-down and desperate feel.

Bosch noticed two old black men sitting on crates in the corner of the lot, under a sprawling and shade-giving eucalyptus tree. He opened the file he’d brought with him and studied the map that charted the location of the body. He estimated that it was less than fifty feet from where the two men were now sitting. He turned pages in the file until he found the incident report which named the two witnesses who reported finding the body.

“I’m getting out,” he said. “I’m going to go talk to those guys.”

He got out and Edgar did, too. They crossed the lot nonchalantly and approached the two men. As they got closer, Bosch saw sleeping bags and an old Coleman camp stove. Parked against the trunk of the eucalyptus were two supermarket carts filled with clothing, bags of aluminum cans and assorted junk.

“Are you men Rufus Gundy and Andy Mercer?”

“Depends on who’s doin’ the askin’.”

Bosch showed his badge.

“I wanted to ask a few questions about the body you guys found here last year.”

“Yeah, what took you so long?”

“Are you Mr. Gundy or Mr. Mercer?”

“I’m Mercer.”

Bosch nodded.

“Why do you say we took so long? Weren’t you interviewed by detectives when you found the body?”

“We was interviewed, but not by no detectives. Some wet-eared patrol boy akst us what we knew.”

Bosch nodded. He pointed to the sleeping bags and the camp stove.

“You guys live here?”

“We runnin’ a piece of bad luck. We just stayin’ till we on our feet again.”

Bosch knew there was nothing in the incident report about the two men living on the lot. The report said they were passing through the lot, looking for cans, when they came across her body. He thought about this and realized what had happened.

“You were living here then, weren’t you?”

Neither of them answered.

“You didn’t tell the cops that because you thought you might get run off.”

Still no reply.

“So you hid your sleeping bags and your stove and called it in. You told that patrol officer that you were just passing through.”

Finally, Mercer spoke.

“If’n you’re so smart, how come you ain’t chief yet?”

Bosch laughed.

“Because they’re smart enough not to make me chief. So, tell me something, Mr. Mercer and Mr. Gundy. If you two were sleeping here during nights back then, you probably would’ve found that body a lot sooner if it had been here the whole time she was missing, right?”

“Most likely,” Gundy said.

“So somebody probably dumped that body the night before you found it.”

“Could be,” Gundy said.

“Yeah, I’d say that was so,” Mercer added.

“With you two sleeping, what, forty, fifty feet away?”

This time they didn’t verbally agree. Bosch stepped over and dropped into a catcher’s squat so he was on their eye level.

“Tell me what you men saw that night.”

“We didn’t see nothin’,” Gundy said adamantly.

“But we heard things,” Mercer said. “Heard things.”

“What things?”

“A car pull up,” Mercer said. “A door open, then a trunk. We heard somethin’ heavy hit the ground. Then the trunk closed and the door, then the car drive off.”

“You didn’t even look?” Edgar asked quickly. He had stepped over and was leaning down, hands on his knees. “A body gets dumped there fifty feet away and you don’t look?”

“No, we don’t look,” Mercer retorted. “People be dumpin’ their garbage and whatnot in the field most every night. We never look. We keep our heads down. In the morning we look. We get some nice items time to time from what people throw away. We always wait till mornin’ to check out what they throw.”

Bosch nodded that he understood and hoped Edgar would leave the men alone.

“And you never told all of this to the cops?”

“Nope,” Mercer and Gundy said in unison.

“What about anybody else? You ever told it to somebody who could verify this has been the true story all along?”

The men thought about it. Mercer was shaking his head no when Gundy nodded yes.

“The only one we told was Mr. Elias’s man.”

Bosch glanced at Edgar and then back at Gundy.

“Who’s that?”

“His man. The investigator. We told him what we told you. He said Mr. Elias was gonna use us in court one day. He said Mr. Elias would be takin’ care of us.”

“Pelfry?” Edgar asked. “Was that his name?”

“Could be,” Gundy said. “I don’t know.”

Mercer didn’t say anything.

“You guys read the paper today?” Bosch asked. “See any TV news?”

“On what TV?” Mercer asked.

Bosch just nodded and stood up. They didn’t even know Elias was dead.

“How long ago was that when Mr. Elias’s man talked to you?”

“Be about a month,” Mercer said. “Somewhere around that.”

Bosch looked at Edgar and nodded that he was done. Edgar nodded back.

“Thanks for your help,” Bosch said. “Can I buy you guys some dinner?”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out his money. He gave each man a ten. They thanked him politely and he walked away.

As they sped north on Western to Wilshire, Bosch started riffing on what the information from the two homeless men meant.

“Harris is clear,” he said excitedly. “That’s how Elias knew. Because the body was moved. It was dumped there three days after she was dead. And Harris was in custody when it was moved. The best alibi in the world. Elias was going to bring those two old guys into court and put the lie to the LAPD.”

“Yeah, but hold on, Harry,” Edgar said. “It doesn’t clear Harris completely. It could just mean he had an accomplice. You know, who moved the body while he was in lockup.”

“Yeah, then why dump it so close to his apartment and further implicate him? I don’t think there’s an accomplice. I think it was the real killer. He read in the paper or saw on TV that they had Harris as a suspect and he moved the body to his neighborhood, to be another nail in Harris’s coffin.”

“What about the fingerprints? How did Harris’s prints get into that nice mansion in Brentwood? Are you goin’ along with them being planted by your buddy Sheehan and his team?”

“No, I’m not. There’s an explanation. We just don’t know it yet. It’s what we ask Pel —”

There was a loud explosion as the rear window shattered and glass blasted through the car. Edgar momentarily lost control and the car swerved into the oncoming lanes. There was a chorus of angry horns as Bosch reached over and yanked the wheel right, bringing the car back across the yellow lines.